Subscribe to this blog

Follow This Week in SRI by Email

Black Unemployment Jumps to 7.7%

Five days after the trump administration proclaimed that "African-American unemployment stands at the lowest rate ever recorded,” the US Department of Labor reported on Friday that Black unemployment for the month of January jumped to 7.7%.

As we noted on 12/30/17 in our Fully Adjusted Return Economic Forecast summary,

"Black unemployment falls at the end of a sustained period of domestic economic growth and falls with a decline in immigration. This is counterbalanced, however, by increasing racism in general and specifically negative, anti-Black racial attitudes. Given an increase in the latter, we expect Black unemployment to increase toward the end of 2018, despite positive headwinds from reduced immigration."

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Everyone’s probably heard of “bitcoin,” but many only have the vaguest idea about it and little understand the underlying technology. Even fewer realize the true impact this technology may have on the future.Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency. A cryptocurrency is a digital program or asset designed to work like currency. It seeks to have the following properties: a store of value, a unit of account, and a medium of exchange Bitcoin is the most popular cryptocurrency of the seven hundred out there. Other major cryptocurrencies are Ethereum, Ripple, and Litecoin.

Cryptocurrencies work via a system of paired-public, private keys - randomly generated numbers. Each user in the cryptocurrency network has a unique pair of public and private keys. The public key is a string of numbers available to everybody on the network. They are used for encryption. The private key is only available to an individual. It is used for decryption of the paired public key. The bitcoin transfer mechanism works…

"WASHINGTON — Top banking regulators were taken aback..when a California congresswoman helped set up a meeting in which the chief executive of a bank with financial ties to her family asked them for up to $50 million in special bailout funds, Treasury officials said.

Representative Maxine Waters, Democrat of California, requested the September meeting on behalf of executives at OneUnited, one of the nation’s largest black-owned banks. Ms. Water’s husband, Sidney Williams, had served on the bank’s board of directors until early last year and has owned at least $250,000 in stock in the institution. Treasury officials said the session with nearly a dozen senior banking regulators had been intended to allow minority-owned banks and their trade association to discuss the losses they had incurred from the federal takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. But Kevin Cohee, OneUnited’s chief executive, instead seized the opportunity to plead for special as…

An effort to boycott the Oscars has gained significant traction, even leading to "a history-making announcement by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences about diversifying its membership.."
Simple economic analysis reveals why the Academy responded so quickly. It also reveals why the course of action chosen is likely to be less effective than many hope. Finally, it points to a more effective solution.
As noted in the charts above and below, both drawn from the 2014 Motion Picture Association of America Stat Book, Asians, African-Americans and Hispanics comprised 46% of movie ticket sales in 2014.
You don't need an MBA from the University of Chicago to know policies and practices that disrespect 46% of your customers, while several of your employees make statements that appear to channel Donald Trump's perspective on diversity, are bad for business. As I wrote in an MLK Day post, Dr. King stated quite clearly that "If you respect my dollar you must res…